ракI дир кидаго мугIрузда буго

Lost in Translation?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I used a bilingual Russian-Avar edition of Taras Bulba to kick-start my studies – a less painful and more authentic way of easing into a language than the endless cramming of grammar rules and vocabulary through sanitized textbook texts. Though riddled with typos and OCR errors, and variant spellings and dialect forms, the Avar translation is a more-or-less faithful rendition of the original.

Having finished it to my amazement, and relief (the story itself is not one of my favorites), I turned my attention to the famous Dagestani poet and author Rasul Gamzatov’s “My Dagestan” after turning up the Avar original on the internet. I was overjoyed at this unexpected find.

However joy quickly turned to frustration at the first few lines, whose Russian rendering had a rather…loose connection to the Avar original:

(Russian: Before taking flight, a plane rumbles for a long time, then is driven through the entire aerodrome onto the tarmac, then it rumbles even more loudly, then circles around and only after having done all this, takes off.)

Delving further into the book, the Russian “translation” got ever looser – a more and more wildly elaborate riff on the spare, laconic Avar.

And then I stumbled on a 6-page-long passage that was completely ignored by the Russian translator.

And then followed long, elaborate pieces of Russian “translation” that simply did not exist in the Avar original (or perhaps got shuffled around and are buried in some other part of the book).

Ok, I’m a translator myself, and know very well that readability often comes at the expense of accuracy, and some sacrifices need to be made. But large parts of this translation were just pure invention, and large parts were not translated at all. And that’s in only 30-odd pages of 498.

And immediately many questions arose (apart from the obvious – “how on earth am I going to finish this?”). How well did the translator know Avar (a profile lists translations from languages as diverse as Buryat, Kyrgyz, Georgian…) and how did he learn it? Did the original author have a hand in all this “poetic license”? Is it all just an elaborate joke? Or did they think nobody would notice? Because it is the official, Soviet-published edition of this book. The one by which most of the the world knows it, and the one that is the base for the translation into English.

I have thoughts about making a direct translation from the Avar into English when, and if, I get far enough in the language. But for now I’m left just a bit stunned.

Addendum: after doing a little research it turns out that it was a not-uncommon practice in the Soviet Union for translators to “translate” from languages they did not know. In the case of Gamzatov:

And it so happened that in his third year of studies a small collection of his poems translated into Russian, “My Land”, was published in Dagestan. The translation was done by Naum Grebnev and Yakov Kozlovsky, fellow classmates at the institute. They, of course, did not know Avar and made use of interlinear translations, sometimes going to the author for further clarification.

Of course it would be great if the translator knew the author’s mother tongue. But the most important thing is for the translator to see the world from the poet’s point of view.I know there are very few (foreign) people who know Avar. But now Avar literature can be read in dozens of different languages. This book of mine will be translated to Russian not from the original, but from interlinear translations.